Michael Connelly on Cold Cases, Police Stories, and His New Podcast

With 'Murder Book' Connelly Has a New Approach to Crime

Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles crime roots run deep. For the better part of the last three decades, his Harry Bosch novels have been detailing the life and times of that quintessentially American city through the stories of one dogged homicide detective with a well-known penchant for jazz and a constitutional inability to leave any case, no matter how small or sensitive, behind. The Bosch novels have earned Connelly as wide and devoted an audience as any author working today, but they’re not his only contributions to the world of crime writing. Through Mickey Haller, Terry McCaleb, and Renee Ballard and their sometimes overlapping series, Connelly’s work has radiated outward to touch new corners of Los Angeles, laying out new stories of corruption, bureaucracy, and occasional heroism from professionals and citizens alike.

Connelly’s newest project, the Murder Book podcast, tells the true story of a 1987 carjacking murder. The case would unfold over the next thirty years, as witnesses dropped, new evidence emerged, and new techniques for analyzing that evidence were developed, all playing out as the defendant, Pierre Romain, attempted to pursue a law enforcement career of his own. The podcast relies on Connelly’s vast and diverse knowledge of Los Angeles crime, but also on the detectives who actually investigated the case against Romain, men and women with whom Connelly has worked closely over many years, first as a crime reporter for the L.A. Times, then as a novelist, and also as the co-creator behind the hit Amazon series, Bosch. These detectives—Rick Jackson, Tim Marcia, and Mitzi Roberts—and their stories form the backbone of the podcast, taking listeners into the gritty details of a long-running homicide investigation and the difficult business of keeping a case together for thirty years. That case is still unfolding today—Connelly has been granted access to record portions of the trial, and week-to-week listeners are waiting to hear the case’s fate. It’s a process that, Connelly says, takes him back to his days in journalism, breaking news and waiting for the ripple effects the next day. It’s a captivating story and a compelling new chapter in the life of one of crime literature’s most important voices.

I caught up with Connelly to discuss his long history of telling stories about Los Angeles and the L.A.P.D., the so-called “murder books” detectives rely on so devotedly, and how he’s taking to the world of podcasting.

Dwyer Murphy: You’ve written dozens of novels, some of the most celebrated and popular crime fiction around, not to mention the TV series. What drew you to the idea of making a podcast?

MICHAEL CONNELLY: I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, especially in the last couple years. I do a lot of walking, and at some point I switched over from listening to music to listening to podcasts. So I’ve been thinking about them. Also, it has something to do with what’s going on in the world today. Journalism is under fire from different parts of the political world, and that seemed to reawaken some of my journalism genes. I haven’t been a reporter in twenty-five years. But I wanted a chance to tell true stories. I’ve been lucky enough to have detectives who help me get my novels right. And these detectives, they’re working real cases, they have real stories. I thought a podcast might be the right storytelling venue where I could have them tell some of their stories.

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What was the initial research for this? How did you come across the case?

It has to do with the way I research my books. I hang out with a small cadre of detectives—three detectives, give or take—and we have breakfast. I don’t come with an agenda or a notebook and there’s no tape recorder on the table. We just have breakfast. These detectives, they’re great storytellers. And they also want to update each other on the cases they’re working. They forget I’m even there.

This story—the murder case against Pierre Romain—came out of those conversations. I was hearing about Romain and the strange things that had happened in this case, which was spread out over thirty plus years. It felt like it could work as a podcast. Also, I had the access. The case had different lead detectives over those three decades, and I knew them all. I also heard second hand that the judge in the case read my books, and I thought, maybe he’ll let me record in court.

It seems, also, to fit in with the kinds of stories you tell in your fiction. This is a case that spanned a lot of years, a lot of people, and worked its way through the entire system.

I’m dealing here with a case from way below the social radar, from the deep trenches of the justice system, one that never got much attention, but I knew there was some drama in it, and if I told the story right it would draw some people in. It’s never going to be a Serial type case, I don’t think, but if you like what I do in my books, I think you’ll like what I do in my podcast, too.

“People are conditioned to feel like they know generally how the system works. In my books, and in my podcast, I invite those people to take a ride with me and to find out how it really works.”

It’s not a whodunnit, it’s a how-do-we-get-em story. It gives you a good view of how the system grinds along in these cases. The Pierre Romain case is more routine than the kinds of cases that usually capture the public imagination—the O.J. Simpson trial, for example. More often than not, the system grinds and works in the way it does in Murder Book. People are conditioned to feel like they know generally how the system works. In my books, and in my podcast, I invite those people to take a ride with me and to find out how it really works.

The title of the podcast, Murder Book, has a special significance. It’s the physical file that detectives keep throughout the course of a homicide investigation. It has everything in there. This is something you’ve written about before. Can you tell me a bit about murder books and why they’ve endured in the law enforcement community?

The murder book is a device I use in my fiction all the time, with Harry Bosch, the fictional detective I’ve been writing about for more than twenty five years. It’s like a Bible. It’s a comfort to him to have the murder book because he firmly believes the answers are in there.

It’s a digital world out there and everything’s put on computers and in digital form these days, but yet they still have these libraries full of murder books at the LAPD. There’s a simple explanation as to why: in California courts, discovery still has to be documented. In the federal court system that’s been relaxed and it’s almost all gone digital. But in state courts if you’re going to show the jury a document you have to hand them a piece of paper. You don’t put it up on a screen. So detectives are required to keep everything in physical files.

Those physical files become the murder book. It’s a visual, symbolic, physical representation of a murder investigation. That’s always been attractive to me as a crime novelist. It was attractive to build a podcast around it, too.

The story of this investigation is also wrapped up in a particular moment in law enforcement history, a time in the early aughts when police departments started opening cold case units and getting back into long-dormant homicide cases. How did that part of the story come together? I take it cold cases are a favorite subject for you.

Cold cases are something I fell into with the books. When the cold case unit started in 2001 in Los Angeles, I’d been writing about Harry Bosch for a while, and in one book he got so frustrated with a case, he quit the LAPD. Then I wrote a few books with him as a private eye, and I realized I’d made a mistake, because I really like writing about him within the politics and bureaucracy of the police department. So I thought that’s it, I blew it, maybe I’ll just have to create a new character. I was under the impression that once you quit the LAPD they don’t take you back. Then I came across the story of a detective I’d sort of known when I was a reporter, Rick Jackson. He’d retired, but they allowed him to come back to work cold cases. So I copied that for Harry Bosch. Basically I piggybacked on Jackson’s real experiences and had Bosch come back to the LAPD to work cold cases.

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So that’s what got me into cold cases in terms of research. I knew the head detective of the unit. And I met the three main detectives who are involved in this podcast—Tim Marcia, Mitzi Roberts, and Rick Jackson. They all came out of the LAPD cold case unit. You know water seeks its own level. I’m an outsider, so wherever I can get into the department, I’m going to take that opportunity to use that knowledge and fictionalize it. It was natural, a decade late, that I’d choose a cold case investigation to do with this podcast.

By the way, that unit was dissolved about six months ago by the new new chief, who wanted to redeploy those resources—i.e. detectives—to other crimes. So there’s actually no longer a cold case unit, which is strange to me, but new people come in and they tailor the department to their philosophies.

One of the more peculiar parts of the Pierre Romain case was the testimony of a key witness, a man who was upset with himself for not being able to remember more and so went to get himself hypnotized, which, in a cruel twist of fate, meant that he was no longer allowed to testify at all, because of a rule in California courts. That’s obviously a pretty dramatic piece to the story. I imagine it perked up your novelist’s ears quite a bit.

When I was a reporter—this is going back into the 80s—I knew a detective who was totally sold on what a great tool hypnosis was. He felt he was able to draw different things out of people that helped him solve cases. So I was very aware that California courts had shut down this avenue and disallowed testimony from witnesses who’d been hypnotized. When I was talking with the detectives in the podcast, and when they told me the Pierre Romain case was finally coming up, thirty years after the crime, I started asking questions like a reporter. I wanted to know why it had taken so many years to get to trial if they thought it was him all along. They revealed that this crazy thing had happened in the case, where the key witness went and got hypnotized and therefore his testimony was disallowed. That idea was fascinating to me. Here’s this guy, driven by guilt, wanting to help bring justice, and he ends up sabotaging the case unintentionally. That’s dramatic. That was one reason I was drawn to the case and this part of the story.

“Here’s this guy, driven by guilt, wanting to help bring justice, and he ends up sabotaging the case unintentionally. That’s dramatic.”

Then there was fact that they were more or less able to raise this guy from the dead as a witness using a hypnosis expert from Stanford. To me this is good storytelling. This would be good stuff in a novel, yet this is a true track of an obscure story that ranges from a street shooting in Los Angeles to the halls of Stanford University School of Medicine. That’s pretty cool. When you can spread a story wide like that, you just have this gut instinct it’s going to be interesting to the viewer or listener. When I’m writing, when I’m into it and I’m enjoying what I’m writing, I think the reader usually feels the same way. I took that kind of philosophy to this podcast.

What’s next? Are there going to be multiple seasons of Murder Book?

I have to be honest, it’s up in the air. I have a couple other jobs that I feel are more important. I have to take care of my family better. I have to weigh all that and decide when I can do this. I want to do it again. I want to find a case that’s different from this one, but also has that same kind of window into an unseen world. So I’m looking around and I have a few candidates and a few people who are interested in working with me. It’s a wait and see kind of thing. I hope to do it again for sure. I’ve been a storyteller of some kind for 40 years, essentially: newspapers, books, nonfiction, fiction, TV, a couple movies. To me, this is the new frontier of journalism.

How has the reaction been? It must be pretty different from what you’re used to with the novels or even the series, which necessarily have a long timeline. With a podcast, you’re getting an almost immediate connection to, and response from, listeners.

It brings me back to my journalism days. I’d write my stories and the next morning it’d be in the paper and there would be feedback, and they would have an impact. This feels like that. Tomorrow I’m doing some pickups and some final rewriting and some recording for the episode that’ll drop on Monday. There’s more immediacy to it. And as I said before, this story is not over. There are some things that are going to happen in March that will be added to later episodes.

It’s interesting to be reporting again on something that’s still moving, still alive, and at the same time reflecting what’s going on, and bringing in different voices, different participants. It’s a fun process, that’s for sure. And it’s really helped me out creatively. You know that saying about teaching an old dog new tricks? This is a new trick for an old dog. I’m really enjoying it.